Mike Walsh recently wrote on his blog about the use of big data in business. You can read below excerpts from the post.

The best use of Big Data in your business is the one that gives you more clarity on the levers that really drive your performance and profitability. If you don’t want big data to mean even bigger IT budgets, keep it focused on how you can make better decisions.

Example:

Alaska Airlines had lots of data to work with, but very little of it was actionable when it mattered. They knew that if they could give their pilots a real time prediction of their estimated arrival time – the pilots could then make adjustments en route to optimise turnaround. So working with GE and Kaggle, an open platform for innovation contests – they released their flight data as an crowdsourced challenge. What happened next was astounding. They got over 3000 responses from data scientists around the world, the winning algorithm predicting arrival times 40 percent better than the current industry average that was only accurate to within 7 minutes. And more importantly, they gained a powerful new weapon in the war for improving real time results.

Mike Walsh, futurist speaker, author of Futuretainment and CEO of innovation research agency Tomorrow, helps to prepare business leaders for what’s next.

Everything is changing. All the traditional industries we grew up with – media, communication, finance, professional services and retail – are all in the process of being turned upside down and re-invented. The force behind this revolution is not technology but rather consumer behaviour. After all, as interesting as it is when things change, the real magic happens when people do.